Wikibooks:How to obtain public domain books

This page contains useful information about the Wikibooks project.
While this is not a listing of rules or policies, it contains information about an important Wikibooks process, custom etc. This page should be helpful to our users; please let us know if it is not.

There are many resources available on the net that are in the public domain, and therefore freely usable without restrictions for Wikimedia universe (this includes Wikibooks) content.

CAVEAT: Because there is no concept of public domain in Japan's copyright law, even though the materials are claimed public domain, there can be some restrictions such as about commercial use, which has a conflict with GFDL. Also, unlike the United States, most English speaking commonwealth countries exert Crown copyright. Please make certain that in any particular jurisdiction government agencies will allow you to copy materials without permission.

India government sites also seem to be copyright by default. Quoting from [1]: Unless otherwise stated, copyright and all intellectual property rights in all material presented on the site (including but not limited to text, audio, video or graphical images), trademarks and logos appearing on this site are the property of Government of Maharashtra and are protected under applicable Indian laws. Any infringement shall be vigorously defended and pursued to the fullest extent permitted by law.

The resources below are valuable, but many are very old, context-dependent, written from biased points of view, and otherwise are not in themselves good encyclopedia articles. The 1911 encyclopedia discussed below is a good example of this - it contains some useful information, but also antiquated writing style and innumerable errors of fact.

So please, if you copy material from these sources, make sure you take some time to verify the actuality of the information, edit, update, introduce, or otherwise produce a good article out of it rather than just dumping it here verbatim. But if you can't do that, put it in anyway because somebody else will come by and tweak it. Wikibooks books are living texts, because everybody has the power to edit them. An entry that starts out incorrect, as a stub or even as something very inane will eventually be tweaked and evolve into something much more sophisticated.

Most publications of the United States Federal Government. Under the Federal Copyright Act material that is originated by the Federal government is not subject to copyright. In some cases, material may originate with a private contractor which assigns the copyright to the agency. However, material that is generated by the Federal government which doesn't have a notice can be copied. Entries below marked "(US Federal Govt.)" belong to this category. Note this only applies to the *Federal* government. United States state governments can copyright materials.

Project Gutenberg See in particular The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia (although only Vol 1 of this seems to be available). Note that not all of the Project Gutenberg text are fully in the public domain. Read the license of the respective texts carefully.

1911 Encyclopedia A scanned version of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. The OCR quality is not very high. Some articles end in the middle and continue on the next page. The writing style is antiquated and archaic, contains a fair amount of bias, and the material contains many factual errors. Anything taken from here needs extensive fact-checking and editing. See Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica for ways of best using this material.

This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which recently became part of the public domain, contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations. This online version contains the unedited contents of the original encyclopedia. Since the original work was completed almost 100 years ago, it does not cover a significant portion of modern Jewish History (e.g., the creation of Israel, the Holocaust, etc.). However, it does contain an incredible amount of information that is remarkably relevant today.

We are considering inviting the Internet community to help us update the encyclopedia -- if you are interested in volunteering (as a writer, editor, etc.) please join our Mailing List. By putting this important work on the Internet, we hope to improve the quality of Jewish information available online -- and stimulate new discussion. Therefore, we have sections "Discussion Forums" and "Internet Links" which allow our visitors to converse and identify related websites.

ibiblio.org is a major repository of information, "the public's library and digital archive". All collections on ibiblio are assumed to be in the public domain unless otherwise noted. Check for copyright notices on any material you wish to use.

A Pronouncing dictionary of Biography and Mythology. Contains a large number (10000+) short NPOV biographical entries many of which could be copied and pasted to form stubs (due to its focus it contains information on many 19th and 18th century figures not yet covered in Wikibooks).

(US Federal Govt.) US Forest Service Fire Effects Database Database of current information on a wide variety of tree, shrub, grass, mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian species found largely in North America -- great reference material

Classics in the History of Psychology is a collection of classic public domain works in psychology collected by Christopher D. Green: see here for a note about the copyright status of the individual documents in the collection.

(US Federal Govt.) US Energy Information Agency - statistics and info on energy industry (mostly US but some stuff for the world) - they appreciate but do not require acknowledgement (copyright info here)

(US Federal Govt.) Federal Standard 1037C, a telecommunications glossary, appears to be mostly in the public domain based on these principles, and is a source of a large number of bits of useful material. A few items are derived from copyrighted sources: where this is the case, there is an attribution to the source. Note: only those articles that have substantial content and are from 100% public domain sources are appropriate to be used in Wikibooks

(US Federal Govt.) DISA site about commercial telecommunications standards From the site: "This site is maintained by the Commercial Standards Division of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide information about the current status of commercial telecommunications standards."

(US Federal Govt.) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "In general all information presented in these pages and all items available for download are for public use. However, you may encounter some pages that require a login password and id. If this is the case you may assume that information presented and items available for download therein are for your authorized access only and not for redistribution by you unless you are otherwise informed."

(US Federal Govt.) USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory Contains nutritional information on loads of foods. (From FAQ), "USDA food composition data is in the public domain and there is no copyright. We would appreciate it if you would list us as the source of the data and when possible we would like to see the product which uses the data or be notified of its use."

(US Federal Govt.) Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (needs positive confirmation before use: some diagrams within the text say "used by permission", which implies that they are copyrighted -- however, the rest appears to be written by U.S. govt employees)

(US Federal Govt.) The NCI thesaurus is a massive public domain repository of definitions of medical terms

(US Federal Govt.) Federal Emergency Management Agency: Not sure how much of this is useful, but anyway it's under the same terms as the U.S. Department of State site: all in the public domain unless it carries an explicit copyright notice.

(US Federal Govt.) Voice Of America - All text, audio and video material produced exclusively by the Voice of America is public domain. However, some images and graphics are licensed for use and covered by all applicable copyright laws.

Brewer's Reader's Handbook, published in 1898, states that "the object of this Handbook is to supply readers and speakers with a lucid but very brief account of such names as are used in allusions and references, whether by poets or prose writers". Contains many short articles, some on obscure topics.

Infoanarchy: a weblog dedicated to copyright issues. All original material is in the public domain, although some redistributed articles may be under copyright.

"Ethical treatment for all youth", a website that documents therapy and detention of children and juveniles for consensual sexual activity. Author wrote to me in a personal email: "Certainly, I intend everything at my site to be in the public domain, to be used freely by anyone else. Of course, I would appreciate it if people who use it would link to my site, since I can use all the exposure I can get."

Here are some web searches which may help discover U.S. Federal Government and other public domain documents. Please note that you must still manually verify that documents are in the public domain. Please note that not all sites in the .gov domain are U.S. federal government sites: some may be U.S. state or other local government sites.

The Creative Commons initiative may become a valuable new resource for Wikibooks authors. The project provides a "wizard" for licensing information under various open content licenses (including the public domain, which is not a license), and also features a directory of these works. (See also Creative Commons License)